Famous Reviews eBook

the wretched scribbler himself has had the gross and
unfeeling folly to punish them all to the world, and
that too in a tone of levity that could have been
becoming only on our former comparatively trivial
charges against him of wearing yellow breeches, and
dispensing with the luxury of a neckcloth. He
shakes his shoulders, according to his rather iniquitous
custom, at being told that he is suspected of adultery
and incest! A pleasant subject of merriment,
no doubt, it is—­though somewhat embittered
by the intrusive remembrance of that unsparing castigator
of vice, Mr. Gifford, and clouded over by the melancholy
breathed from the shin-bone of his own poor old deceased
grandmother. What a mixture of the horrible and
absurd! And the man who thus writes is—­not
a Christian, for that he denies—­but, forsooth,
a poet! one of the

Great spirits who on earth are sojourning!

But Leigh Hunt is not guilty, in the above paragraph,
of shocking levity alone,—­he is guilty
of falsehood. It is not true, that he learns for
the first time, from that anonymous letter (so vulgar,
that we could almost suspect him of having written
it himself) what charges were in circulation against
him. He knew it all before. Has he forgotten
to whom he applied for explanation when Z.’s
sharp essay on the Cockney Poetry cut him to the heart?
He knows what he said upon those occasions, and let
him ponder upon it. But what could induce him
to suspect the amiable Bill Hazlitt, “him, the
immaculate,” of being Z.? It was this,—­he
imagined that none but that foundered artist could
know the fact of his feverish importunities to be
reviewed by him in the Edinburgh Review. And
therefore, having almost “as fine an intellectual
touch” as “Bill the painter” himself,
he thought he saw Z. lurking beneath the elegant exterior
of that highly accomplished man.

Dear Hazlitt, whose tact intellectual
is such,
That it seems to feel truth as one’s
fingers do touch.

But, for the present, we have nothing more to add.
Leigh Hunt is delivered into our hands to do with
him as we will. Our eyes shall be upon him, and
unless he amend his ways, to wither and to blast him.
The pages of the Edinburgh Review, we are confident,
are henceforth shut against him. One wicked Cockney
will not again be permitted to praise another in that
journal, which, up to the moment when incest and adultery
were defended in its pages, had, however openly at
war with religion, kept at least upon decent terms
with the cause of morality. It was indeed a fatal
day for Mr. Jeffrey, when he degraded both himself
and his original coadjutors, by taking into pay such
an unprincipled blunderer as Hazlitt. He is not
a coadjutor, he is an accomplice. The day is
perhaps not far distant, when the Charlatan shall be
stripped to the naked skin, and made to swallow his
own vile prescriptions. He and Leigh Hunt are